Wow. Where do I begin? This is more appreciable by those in the UK and Europe but I urge people the world over to make themselves aware of a very real crisis. A crisis not in terms of influx of refugees to European nations but crisis in the lack of love and good will we show to them as fellow human beings. What’s rattled my cage? An album of photos circulating on social media of bodies washed up. 80 of them, just a handful photographed. Palestinian and Syrian refugees trying to reach a better life in Europe. An image of a young boy, blue and lifeless as the waves wash over him.

British media would blind us to this situation with claims that these people are relocating to the UK to take advantage of the welfare system. Yes, according to the Emperor Rupert Murdoch, women are floating in the sea cradling their babies just above drowning point for the sake of less than £100 a week. I think if you can swallow that story, you too could probably swallow gallons of salt water and make it to shore. Belief is everything, right?

Immediately I saw these, I began emailing my MP and at that point remembered my childhood in this green and pleasant land where GM crops, bee-killing pesticides and social media, the powerful tool we ignore for its opportunities to change the world, had not been invented. And I remembered watching UK kids TV and being shown humanitarian crises in Ethiopia and the Sudan; children starving, babies never making it past their mothers’ arms. We rallied then, us children. We did all sorts of fundraising activities, sponsored this, handmade that, bring and buy sales and we sent that money off to provide food to those poor, starving people.

Fast forward thirty years or so and the crisis is knocking on our door asking for a loaf of bread and a roof for the night. So what do we do? We corral them instead into what amount to concentration camps and say you must go through the proper channels. Forging their way across the sea in nothing but an inflatable dinghy does not show enough need to be anywhere but where you came from?

People I know, I am sad to say, subscribe to the media-mogul-manufactured spoon-feeding system and truly believe those people risk their very lives and those of their children to come here where they will be financially worse off than in their homeland but physically safer. Yes, they have risked all for such uncertainty and to live among people who all but spit upon them and shun them for their courage. Shame on us.

Among my generation, where are those children who raised money for people starving in Africa? Is it as Billy Connolly once said – charitable apathy? We watched it on TV as children, so humanitarian crisis is normal to us. No. Surely not. It is not normal to me and will never be acceptable. This a more recent malaise in the belief in love of and for humanity. Why, though? Are we told too many times that we are destroying our planet, that the human race cannot survive far into the future anymore? Have we learned that no matter what we do, the government, whoever they happen to be right now, will make us suffer for it? We do not know suffering. Not since my grandparents’ generation have we really suffered as a nation and even then not as Palestine and Syria do right now. We didn’t let children in Africa suffer because they didn’t want to nor had the facility to flee to our shores. Other people went and helped them at home. We didn’t run the risk of meeting them on our own streets! They were safe and sanitised humanitarian aid by comparison. But they had places to live. These courageous, seafaring, aspirational folk in 2015 have no such thing.

A woman is raped in the streets of the UK in daylight and cries for help, no-one goes to her. If she cries fire, many will attend. That has happened again in the beautiful Newcastle recently. The attacker was a tall white man. No immigrant. But he might have been, just he would have been the ‘acceptable’ kind (I speak in the attitude of the great British public this decade). And as I say that, I’m reminded that many argue we are a Christian nation and anyone coming here must accept that. I laugh at that. How Christian are we when we let children drown instead of doing something to alleviate the crisis causing that drowning?

If you are reading this, the chances are you are human. Look beyond your bubble and see, this world is in pain. People are in pain and dying to be free of their own homes! Why can the vast majority, or it so seems, only see that “they want our money and our jobs”. Media. The most powerful people in any nation are those controlling the press. I seriously hope that majority are saving up those papers to make themselves a boat because global warming, that other thing you read about but do so little to help, will see Great Britain vastly reduced in land mass. When you wash up on someone else’s shore, will it be for the benefits or for a safe, dry home?

Imagine if you will that you are a child living in a beautiful location, rolling hills, lush greenery, ancient trees that have been around for many centuries. The hills and valleys are scattered with all manner of wild flower and animals both wild and farm.

Because your government hasn’t invented welfare and support for young families yet and also hasn’t regulated wages, your parents can’t earn enough to keep you all in food and clothing let alone lodgings. The only answer is for you to work as well.

On a hot summer’s day, the fourth of July, the sun shining across that playground of nature all around you, instead of running out into the fields with your dog, your outdoor toys, your sporting goods, whatever you would prefer to be playing with, you head for the mine down in the valley.

You’re working away, shovelling the coal dug out by the menfolk into trestles hooked to a small, steam-driven transport engine to carry the coal back to the surface. You don’t hear the rumble of thunder above the surface, you’re so far under the ground and the work is noisy.

Around 3pm the alarm is sounded. The engine has ceased to work because water is leaking into it from somewhere above. Everyone is told to head back down to the tunnel away from the shaft. You’re a child. You’ve already worked since sunrise and you’re confused. You know it’s a long way to walk so you decide to wait until the engine is restored.

The engine does not seem to be getting fixed and you know that work has ceased in the mine. There are 40 of you together down there. You look to one another to figure out what to do. There is another way out that doesn’t rely on the engine. It will bring you out in the woods not far from the mine. That seems like the best idea.

Together you make your way along the tunnel towards that exit. You don’t know that the water coming in near the engine is the first hint that the stream flowing through the woods near the exit you’re heading for has burst its banks under the torrential rain that came with the storm clouds.

You’re making your way as quickly and carefully as you can because you know you’ll have to give account for yourself and quickly. You open a trap-door that serves to regulate air flow and go through. You get closer to daylight when the weight of water becomes too much for the structure at the surface to hold. It rushes through in a raging torrent and you’re knocked from your feet by a wall of surging water, washed back all the way to the trap-door where the water just keeps coming and gathering where it can’t get through the door, which opens upwards.

26 of you bear the brunt of it. It takes the breath from your lungs, it’s dark, you can’t see what’s happening but you can feel the force of water crushing the air from you and refusing to let you keep your head above it. Your small form cannot physically fight it. When the water clears and the adults return to the mine, they find the tragic remains of all 26 of you, drowned in darkness when you were so close to regaining the daylight.

I learned of this recently thanks to information made available by Daz Beattie on the Durham Mining Museum website.

So moved by the story and the spirit of those 26 children, I was compelled to go to the site of the memorial erected to them in the grounds of the parish church of Silkstone. I wanted to visit the place where there memory is strongest and bring them flowers to let them know I wish them love and brightness now they no longer have to face the darkness of the pit; Red, yellow and bright pink sweetheart roses tied by my own hand into a bouquet.

I would urge you to read the page on the DMM website. View the photographs of the memorial and on-going remembrance of the children who paid the ultimate sacrifice. A sacrifice that moved Queen Victoria herself to become involved in ensuring the welfare of women and children and that they no longer were forced by poverty to work in the mines. A silver lining to the darkest of clouds.

The inquest that followed showed some prejudice, almost placing blame upon the children for what was simply a terrible and utterly tragic natural event. It causes me to question why the mine wasn’t better protected against such an incident when the stream was known to be there.

Survivors told their tale as best they could. James Garnett, father of George aged 9 and Catherine aged 8 returned to the mine once the water had subsided and found his children but could not return them to the surface until all of them could be brought above ground.

Benjamin Mellow, a superintendent of the mine, stated at the inquest that the water could not have been more than six inches deep by the marks left. When I close my eyes and feel for those children, I can see a lot more than six inches of water. I can imagine only part of the terror they must have felt however brief it might have been.

On the monument in the cemetery is the following inscription:

“This monument was erected to perpetuate the remembrance of an awful visitation of the Almighty, which took place in this Parish on the 4th July 1838.

On that eventful day, the Lord sent forth his thunder, lightning, hail and rain, carrying devastation before them, and by a sudden eruption of water into the coal pits of R.C. Clarke Esq., twenty six beings whose names are recorded here were suddenly summoned to appear before their maker.

Reader remember:-

Every neglected call of God will appear against thee at the day of Judgement. Let this solemn warning then sink deep into thy heart and so prepare thee that the Lord when he cometh may find thee watching.”

Most importantly, here are the names and ages of the children as inscribed:

George Burkinshaw aged 10 years. James Burkinshaw aged 7 years. (brothers).
Isaac Wright aged 12 years. Abraham Wright aged 8 years. (brothers). James Clarkson aged 16 years. Francis Hoyland aged 13 years. William Alick aged 12 years. Samuel Horne aged 10 years. Eli Hutchinson aged 9 years. George Garnett aged 9 years. John Simpson aged 9 years. George Lamb aged 8 years. William Womerfley aged 8 years.James Turton aged 10 years. John Gothard aged 8 years.

Heartbreaking memorial created more recently for the children of Huskar’s Mine.

We couldn’t find any marked graves for these children in the churchyard. But the monument refers to grave one and grave two. Mass pauper’s graves and nothing to mark them that we could find. Poor parents could not have afforded individual grave or headstone no doubt. Had I been the mine owner, I know for certain I would have paid for a respectful burial for each and every one of them. Poor parents, this time in the sense that I feel their heartache both for their loss and how their beloved children’s remains were treated.

Unable to identify any other definite location to pay my respect, I lay the roses on the steps of the monument itself instead. As I walked back towards it to do that, I could barely make my feet take each step. I ran the tips of my fingers over each inscribed name and offered my heartfelt sorrow and genuine pain at their suffering under their seniors’ direction for the sake of money. It pains me now to think that it was a preventable tragedy had someone taken the time and paid the small costs of reinforcing the banks of the stream. Walking back towards the car the tears streamed down my face and I ached to my core for the merry band of bairns who were washed away from us.

I cannot help but feel for every single one of those little souls, toiling in the darkness only to be swept away from this mortal coil by a summer’s afternoon storm. When I think how children are so excited by the thunder, lightning and unusually heavy rain from such storms, the sadness only grows more poignant. Had I been alone there, I would have sunk to the ground and wept.

What upsets me too is the inscription telling that it was an almighty act of God and very nearly if not actually implying that those children were judged and smote from the earth as a result. That written by a religious leader. What comes to my mind is “suffer the little children to come unto me”. (Matthew 19:16, Luke 18:16).

So I still pray for their spirits that they continue to have a new life filled with light and complete absence of darkened tunnels, toil and hardship. We can never let society regress to the point where children live in such poverty again. And yet we seem to be doing just that.

Because I didn’t have the opportunity to meet them in the physical life, I suggested a carvery dinner and ate so much I could barely move, offering each taste and the enjoyment of a hearty meal to the children, just letting them know how grateful I am for the privilege of living in 2014 England, all the time knowing there are still many children the world over that don’t ever get a meal like that. We must steer towards change. Without the children, what future do we have?